It is well known that the use of electronic devices to monitor a patient's status is a growing trend in healthcare settings. This trend can be attributed to any number of factors including the increased vigilance that can be obtained with electronic monitoring (e.g., electronic monitors never sleep or leave the patient's vicinity for a break), decreased staffing costs (e.g., one caregiver can cover multiple patients), etc.
As a specific example of a patient condition that is especially suitable for electronic monitoring, consider the use of electronic patient monitors to help reduce the risk of a patient fall. By way of general background, a fall places a patient at risk of various injuries including sprains, fractures, and broken bones—injuries which in some cases can be severe enough to eventually lead to a fatality. Of course, those most susceptible to falls (e.g., the elderly and post surgical patients) are often those in the poorest general health and least likely to recover quickly from their injuries. In addition to the obvious physiological consequences of fall-related injuries, there are also a variety of adverse economic and legal consequences that include the actual cost of treating the victim and, in some cases, caretaker liability issues
In the past, it has been commonplace to treat patients that are prone to falling by limiting their mobility through the use of restraints, the underlying theory being that if the patient is not free to move about, he or she will not be as likely to fall. However, research has shown that restraint-based patient treatment strategies are often more harmful than beneficial and should generally be avoided—the emphasis today being on the promotion of mobility rather than immobility. Among the more successful mobility-based strategies for fall prevention include interventions to improve patient strength and functional status, reduction of environmental hazards, and staff training and identification and monitoring of high-risk hospital patients and nursing home residents.
Of course, direct monitoring high-risk patients, as effective as that care strategy might appear to be in theory, suffers from the obvious practical disadvantage of requiring additional staff if the monitoring is to be in the form of direct observation. Thus, the trend in patient monitoring has been toward the use of electrical devices to signal changes in a patient's circumstance to a caregiver who might be located either nearby or remotely at a central monitoring facility, such as a nurses' station. The obvious advantage of an electronic monitoring arrangement is that it frees the caregiver to pursue other tasks away from the patient. Additionally, when the monitoring is done at a central facility a single nurse can monitor multiple patients which can result in decreased staffing requirements.
Generally speaking, electronic monitors work by first sensing an initial status of a patient, and then generating a signal when that status changes, e.g., he or she has sat up in bed, left the bed, risen from a chair, etc., any of which situations could pose a potential cause for concern in the case of an at-risk patient. Electronic bed and chair exit monitors typically use a pressure sensitive switch in combination with a separate monitor/microprocessor. In a common exit monitor arrangement, a patient's weight resting on a pressure sensitive mat (i.e., a “sensing” mat) completes an electrical circuit, thereby signaling the presence of the patient to the microprocessor. When the weight is removed from the pressure sensitive switch, the electrical circuit is interrupted, which fact is sensed by the microprocessor. The software logic that drives the monitor is typically programmed to respond to the now-opened circuit by triggering some sort of alarm—either electronically (e.g., to the nursing station via a conventional nurse call system) or audibly (via a built-in audio alarm).
However, the increasing use of electronic patient monitors is not without its problems. For example, and focusing for the moment on patient exit monitors, the use of such monitors can pose a problem for the staff who might have the responsibility of turning the patient at prescribed intervals, bathing the patient, etc. More particularly, when the caregiver needs to work with the patient a necessary first step is to disable the exit monitor, typically by pressing a “reset” or “hold” button or similar switch provided for that purpose on the exterior of the monitor. However, even the most attentive staff can all too easily forget to reactivate the monitor before exiting, thereby leaving the patient at risk for a fall thereafter. Further, direct contact with a patient monitor—even a contact as fleeting as pressing a “hold” or “reset” switch—can potentially act as a conduit for the spread of bacteria and germs. Of course, these concerns become even more pressing if the patient is in isolation.
More generally, in view of the ever-increasing reliance on electronic patient monitoring of all sorts, a caregiver may be confronted with a wide variety of audio alarms when he or she enters a room. In addition to the bed exit monitors described previously, ventilators, cardiac monitors, IV fluid dispensers, vacuum collection systems, medication pumps, wetness monitors, pressure sore monitors, etc., may each have its own audio alarm. Of course, the purpose of these alarms is to alert the caregiver to potential problems and draw the caregiver into the room. However, once the caregiver has arrived, such alarms have served their purpose and rapidly become a detriment to patient care. For example, the sounds of such alarms may make communication with the patient or another caregiver difficult and may frighten or unnecessarily disturb the patient. As a consequence, the caregiver's first act upon entering the room is usually to silence the alarm(s), rather than to first attend to the emergency that triggered the alarm.
Others have considered this or related problems but the solutions heretofore proposed have generally not been without problems. For example, it is known to provide an electronic patient monitor that can accept a key therein, the purpose of the key being to block access by an enterprising patient to the reset (or, more generally, deactivation) switch. So long as the key is absent, the monitor cannot be reset or otherwise disabled. So, when the caregiver enters the room in response to an alarm, insertion of the key into a receptacle on the monitor's body is a necessary prerequisite to silencing the alarm. However, this sort of configuration can only delay the response of the caregiver to the patient even further, as two operations must now be performed to silence the alarm (insert the key and then press the reset switch) as compared with the single operation that was required previously.
Additionally, sensors other than mat-type pressure sensing switches may be used in patient monitoring including, without limitation, temperature sensors (e.g., U.S. patent Ser. No. 11/132,772), patient activity sensors, toilet seat sensors (see, e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 5,945,914), wetness sensors (e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 6,292,102), pressure sore sensors (e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 6,646,556), etc., all of which are incorporated herein by reference. Thus, in the text that follows the terms “mat” or “patient sensor” should be interpreted in its broadest sense to apply to any sort of patient monitoring switch or device, whether the sensor is pressure sensitive or not.
Finally, technology concerned with reducing the need for caregiver intervention may be found in issued U.S. Pat. No. 6,897,781, also incorporated herein by reference, discusses how white noise can be used in the context of pressure sore prevention.
Heretofore, as is well known in the patient monitoring arts, there has been a need for an invention to address and solve the above-described problems. There has been for some time a need for a device that can assist the caregiver by automatically disabling a patient monitor while the caregiver is in the room and/or working with a patient and which will thereafter automatically reactivate the exit monitor after the caregiver has exited the vicinity of the patient. Accordingly, it should now be recognized, as was recognized by the present inventors, that there exists, and has existed for some time, a very real need for a system for monitoring patients that would address and solve the above-described problems.
Before proceeding to a description of the present invention, however, it should be noted and remembered that the description of the invention which follows, together with the accompanying drawings, should not be construed as limiting the invention to the examples (or preferred embodiments) shown and described. This is so because those skilled in the art to which the invention pertains will be able to devise other forms of this invention within the ambit of the appended claims.